Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

1) SF/NY/Seattle salaries are skewed by really rich companies 2) Yes, there a big uptick as it's more competitive, FYI cost of living is much more. 3) The salary I think has a selection/sample problem that probably over estimates.

My bet is $150K for an experienced dev at a normal company in Boston is probably somewhere in the league of normal.

Consider that salaries are not as an efficient a market as we might imagine. If Boston area companies can get away with paying $140 instead of $180 they will! Most people don't move across the country for a pay raise. Worker mobility in the US is down over the last 30 year (weirdly).

SF has a lot of people moving there which creates a different kind of frothy market.

Boston is established and so everything gets established, including salaries.

Consider the situation: imagine if you had a company making ok profit, with 50 Engineers in Beantown. Do you think you could all of a sudden get your Eng. to the 'next level' by paying SF rates?

So you're staffing costs are way up, but is productivity? Surely, you might be able to bring on the best hires, but will that make all the difference?

It's such a big bet, and the inclination is always to make (or save) money 'now'.

It's a little bit like the 'open vs. closed office' calculation. The CFO can make a direct and measurable compelling case for open office: it's 20% cheaper. Those in favour of a nicer office can't provide the hard numbers on how much the company would increase productivity.

I think salary differentials are a crazy interesting subject and suspect there are a lot of weird and interesting things going on.

I'm from Canada, where any good developer can double their salary by moving to a choice job in the US. Why the hell would young talent stay? Which implies, how the hell can Canadian companies even remotely compete on building great companies of the top tier talent leaves?

Obviously this depends a lot on a companies specific need for hyper-top tier talent, those that don't would maybe be better off out of the Valley.

I also wonder a lot on what would happen if a well funded Canadian startup actually started paying super great salaries. Sure, they'd be able to get the best talent that comes through the door ... but then there's the other paradox: most Canadian cities are not destinations! Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver are regular cities, if you start a company there, most of your applicants will be local. It stands that local talent may not be all that spectacular (good but not great) thereby not justifying really big salaries. And can you really have 'regular salary' for the 'regular, local talent' and then inflated salaries for the international hot talent? That might be hard!

So SF, NY and Seattle have the advantage of being destinations, i.e. cities where people are willing to move, meaning that their quest for talent is really a not a function of the locals, but the top tier of a much broader pool of talent.

Despite the fact that a polygot dev. with tons of experience is always good to have around, and you need some weighing in on big decisions ... most dev is just dev - and a competent mid-tier developer with good habits can do the job in most cases.

My open source/side project experience has opened doors though I'm sure.

I work in New Jersey, as an Enterprise App Full-stack dev with 0 college experience.

I started as a developer 4 years ago @15/hr, and I recently breached the 6 figure mark. I've told my coworkers that I have a fire lit by a sense of inadequacy. I've always been behind classically trained developers, that is what keeps me pushing forward. Always playing 'catch-up'.

Now that I'm involved in my company's interview process, a few thoughts on what having a college degree does for our offers;

1. Because we hire through an agency, we already have a single layer of vetting that helps remove unqualified persons (both college-level and not), which ensure we have a decent, homogeneous pool to conduct face to face interviews with.

2. Whether we hire a candidate with or without a college background, our the offer range isn't enormous. If we have an offer in mind, (say 75k), having a college degree doesn't automatically grant you the high end of our scale. I can't think of a single instance where we cared about their degree once they were in the Face-to-face. Their performance in the interview dictates their offer, and we aren't asking questions like 'How do you implement bubble sort'. We ask some hard skill questions, sure, but we also ask just as many communication and general problem solving ones as well.

3. The range of starting pay is really small for us (think 75k mid, 70k min, 80k max). So that 3% gap makes a lot of sense.

To summarize, a degree may put you in a position to interview, but the range you get paid is largely depending on a wide array of skills, some of which are unrelated to development. Missing some of the hard-skills won't disqualify you for a position as much as missing the communication skills will (for us).